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Let’s take a look at how the top 10 US retailers (in terms of 2013 sales) use Pinterest.

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart currently has 38,278 followers on its Pinterest page, although this is not the largest amount by a long way.

It has topical boards for various holidays to remain relevant. Here’s its St Patrick’s Day board, filled with pins and repinned from sources all around Pinterest and the web, not just its own ecommerce concerns.

It also does a fine line in boards that offer handy tips and advice. From gardening tips to beauty.

It’s this mixture of how-to-guides, repinned images from around the web and its own product listings, along with a huge amount of boards fully stocked with pins, that make Wal-Mart an impressive Pinterest brand.

Kroger

A slightly more humble 2,993 followers, but a nonetheless attractive Pinterest homepage.

There are some great ideas for boards here. I particular like the Unpredictable Matchups one below. However each one suffers from being dramatically underpinned. This one only has 12.

Elsewhere the Feels Like Spring board only has eight pins, and a really helpful Saving Time in the Kitchen board feels rather stymied with 14 pins.

Target

Target has a amassed a massive 149,846 followers with its relatively small amount of boards. However each one is stuffed with pins. Although this occasionally leads to overstuffing.

This Women’s Style board has 638 pins. One of the biggest boards I’ve ever seen. The result is a random menagerie of products where the only theme is ‘women wear things like this’.

Target could do with dividing up thees categories into smaller boards, to make them easier to navigate.

Costco

Costco doesn’t have a Pinterest page. I can’t imagine that a membership only, warehouse club that sells products in massive volumes would make for the most attractive page.

The Home Depot

On an aesthetic level, this isn’t the most appealing range of boards, but with 135,188 followers The Home Depot is doing something right.

Here’s a huge and wonderfully helpful board with hundreds of storage and organisation ideas. These tips are pinned from The Home Depot and repinned from around the globe.

This is brilliant too. A guide to all of the tools you can hire, with videos and written explanations on how to use them all.

Full marks for practicality and helpfulness.

Walgreens

Walgreens only Pinterest concern is this Walgreens Beauty page.

It’s a very hesitant foray into Pinterest, with very little originality or appeal.

This one in particular is less than half-hearted, with specious logic and little sense to why these few products are collected together.

CVS Caremark

Lowe’s

A particularly brilliant feature is the Build It! board, where customers who have used Lowe’s’ products for their DIY projects are showcased.

The strength of Pinterest is being utilised to the full here. Showcasing the customer’s efforts makes the user feel like the brand has a vested interest in their project and creates a deeper level of connection.

This board currently has 3.4m followers. That’s only 100,000 less than the total amount of followers that Lowe’s entire Pinterest account has.

It also remains topical. Here’s Lowe’s partnership with Pantone, revealing 2014’s color of the year. (Radiant Orchid, I know you chomping at the bit to learn.)

Safeway

What Safeway lacks in pins within individual boards, it also lacks in range of original ideas for its themes.

Maybe that’s a little mean, but this really looks like every other middle-of-the-road grocer’s Pinterest page. All the boxes are ticked: seasonal themes, lunchtime ideas, quick meals, sweet treats. There’s just little else to make it a bit more interesting. Mixing the parade of food photography up with other images would certainly help stem the malaise.

McDonald’s

A relatively humble 3,311 followers for this massive global corporation, however boards like the ones below certainly show a keen desire to provide something different for its audience, with content they wouldn’t necessarily see elsewhere.

This is a great board full of menu items from around the world.

It’s encouraging to see a massive brand like McDonald’s use Pinterest in such a unique and surprising way. Many of the above retailers could well take a lesson from that.

Recommended

One in every six occasions, viewers who watch primetime television are also using social media, whether its related to the show they’re watching or not.

This is according to the latest study from the Council for Research Excellence (CRE) based on a sample of 1,665 respondents between September and October 2013.

In an earlier study carried out by Deloitte in 2013, more than half of adults admitted to interacting with another form of media while they watch television, this is more than double the previous year’s figure of 24% who admit to second screening.

This is a huge increase and this figure will likely rise even more steeply in 2014. The Deloitte research however covers all activity on a mobile device, whether it’s interacting on social media, shopping, browsing the internet for unrelated information or sending emails.

Let’s take a look at some more results from the CRE study, which mainly concentrates on the use of social media while second-screening.

If you take the time to churn through the various brand updates that pop up in your Facebok feed, you’ll quickly notice that some look more professional than others. This isn’t necessarily down to the content. On Facebook, formatting counts for quite a bit.

It seems that since the introduction of Instagram’s 15 second video capability, brands and regular users alike have begun to ignore Vine in favour of a social media platform they were already signed up to anyway.

I round-up the best branded Vines on a monthly basis (here are the best branded Vines of February) and I personally feel that there’s still massive potential for the only one-year old Vine when it comes to improving brand perception and connection.

So what separates Vine from Instagram video apart from the obvious technical differences? Perhaps by looking at these examples of Instagram videos from brands we’ll be able to understand how each platform can exist side-by-side whilst remaining different enough to be worthy of separate time and investment.

March 5th 201416:05

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